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+--- Thread: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] (/showthread.php?tid=5782)
The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Twinflame - 12-12-2013
K'ile Tia was ten malms from camp when the smell of burnt flesh first overwhelmed the stink of ash and cinders. Small trails of smoke were mingling together, weaving themselves into a great pillar of shadow cast skywards from the camp. The Sagolii Hipparion Tribe, isolated in the deep deserts of Southern Thanalan, should have been safe. They had left it safe, secure, prosperous, plentiful. Their goal had been to protect it. But the moon, the dragon, the fire: it had reached so far. How could they ever had thought to fight that? How could they ever have understood?
It seemed that not even a single piece of cloth had escaped the fire. Every tent looked as though it had been burnt down, and only a small handful had been rebuilt. Great, tattered sheets had been lain on the outskirts of the camp; K'ile did not have to see beneath them to smell the charred corpses they concealed. Had there been no time to bury them yet, even now, a week since the Calamity? The dunes blowing in, would bury them on its own before much longer.
The light of the Warden did not show mercy to hem this day. It was hot, an echo of the fire. Melted sand shimmered in the distance. Great swaths of the cliffs had been turned black. The camp was silent, and still, oppressed by the heat. K'ile heard hushed voices. He heard the howl of someone in pain, voice choked by audible injury, and did not listen. He could pick out the smell of family members, mingling with fire and ash and pain.
The smell of terror lingered in the ruins like rot over a bog.
Even the shadows of the tens were unmercifully bright; the light reflecting off the sands burnt his eyes. He lifted a hand to shade his face; the flesh of his fingers was tattered and bound in bandages. K'ile swayed in the stinging hot wind of the desert. The pain in his body recalled the battle at Cartenau. He ignored it. His body was a small thing.
K'ile Tia's eyes flicked about the camp. He couldn't have known the mad look in his eyes, the desperate pose of his features and limbs, like a ravenous man in search of food. His emptiness was complete, and yet in the pit that remained of his heart, that darkness somehow boiled. The absence, the strange insanity of loss, frothed against the back of his eyes, clearly visible to those around him.
"They're back!" Someone called, a woman who smelled to K'ile like fire and sweat and terror. "They're back from Cartenau!" She ran up to him, slowed at the look in his eyes, and looked past him. "There's so few of you. Where is everyone else?"
Had anyone followed him. Maybe Yohko and some of the others who had survived the battle. Most had not. There wouldn't be any others. But he didn't say this. He reached out and grabbed the woman by the arm, perhaps accidentally hard. She didn't make any sound or seem offended. She appeared to be sleep-walking. Maybe she already knew where the others were: in the ground. Everyone who hadn't come home was in the ground. "Where's K'piru?" he said, and he couldn't hear his voice. He felt his jaw shivering like a dead limb.
The woman averted her eyes, breathed, and didn't answer at first. "So many are hurt," she muttered, finally, and then, "K'piru... She is..."
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Naunet - 12-12-2013
At some point, the panic and terror that had left K'piru shaking and huddled amongst the rocks in the cliff rolled back. It had to, with so many dead, others caught in their own agonies as seared flesh peeled from muscle and bone, there was no time for her own fear, no time for her own grief. She would look at their strained faces and note only the degree of their pain, or if they had gone slack with death or, mercifully, sleep. The children were the worst, but she couldn't allow herself to see them in any different a light than the rest. The groans and ragged breaths of the wounded were swallowed up by the hide walls surrounding them, one of the few tents they could scavenge from the remains of their camp.
So few would survive.
A thin arm, skin an angry red and blistered, was stuck out in front of her vision, its small hand held gently in her own. As she smeared cool, sticky fluid on that arm, K'piru reminded herself that their supplies were low. She wondered if she could spare the hours it might take to locate more aloe plant, and without even realizing it, she began to organize those remaining by who was most likely to survive.
Her hands took a moment to run through the thin, short hair of the child with the burnt arm, brushing behind his ears, but she didn't linger. She tried to form a prayer for his healing, but the words that she had crafted easily for decades died before they could work past her throat. The child's strained, puffy eyes were not something she could bear to watch, so she moved on.
When someone came and whispered low in one ear that their warriors had returned from battle, K'piru tried to feel relief as she stood. The woman she'd been treating looked up at her, confusion briefly overriding her pain - she wasn't in quite as bad a condition as others - as K'piru wordlessly set aside her tools and moved to the tent's entrance.
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Twinflame - 12-12-2013
His red hair lay flat against this skin, held there by the sweat that pulled about his eyes and on his cheeks. He should be covering himself, conserving his energy, trying to keep from sweating too much. But he didn't have the mind or the care for it. The fire of the battlefield didn't claim him, so what hope did this desert have? If Dalamud had spared him, what hope did Azeyma have? How could he ever again see the Warden as having any power to protect or hinder him, after this?
There was no way to describe what parts of his mind and spirit had been burned away by the Calamity. It had left him with his body, burned and battered and cut, on the verge of crumbling, but it would heal. The spirit would not. Time did not mend all wounds, especially when those wounds were infected.
K'ile Tia could smell K'piru before he saw her, and to him, it was like the scent of a medicinal salve, or a wave of oncoming sleep to sate exhaustion. This had a strange impact upon him. The world which had begun to shrink so quickly as Dalamud fell, suddenly focused to a pinprick, to just that woman. In the mix of scents that described the shaman, he could pick out the lingering smell of K'thalen Nunh, his brother, her mate. He could smell the wounds of others on her hands, of herbs and poultices, sweat and blood and desperation.
For a moment, in the heat and the dry air, K'ile wavered on his feet. Weakness washed over him, and the pain from slow-healing wounds that dappled his flesh in great number clamored at his senses.
He cursed them, and turned his gaze on K'piru as she exitted the tent. K'ile could barely see her. So bright was the light, and his vision so vexed by pain, sweat in his eyes. He didn't need to; it was her, his brother's woman. The hearts of K'ile's brother, Thalen's children, and K'piru, all pumped the same familial blood as surely as they were attached in their veins.
K'ile approached the woman quickly. He might have run. He couldn't sense his own limbs. But he couldn't say anything either. What could he say? Where in the world was there a language that had words for times like this? Some cursed place, with a cursed tongue. Whatever realm it was that had birthed words such as Dalamud and Garlemald. Surely that place would have words for this moment.
Without pause, as soon as he could, K'ile blindly let himself rush over K'piru and wrap his arms around her, clutching at her in desperation. The smell of her,as he did this, chased out all other sense. Even in this there was the stench of fire and fear, though, for they wrapped her as sure as anything else. He took her in his arms without word or preamble. He could not have done anything else.
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Naunet - 12-13-2013
K'piru had barely adjusted her eyes to the blinding sun before muscled arms enveloped her, pulling her to a bandaged, bloody chest. Her nose pressed against warm skin, she at first thought it K'thalen and leaned heavily into the embrace. Her shoulders shook.
But when she breathed in, though she caught smooth, comforting edges of K'thalen's scent, it was distant. More than just the char and blood - things she'd smelled so much of the past days that she felt certain they were permanently seared onto her senses - there was the smell of someone else, familiar but different. She brought her hands up to grip the other's elbows.
"K'ile," she breathed out, and her tail curled tight against her leg before she lifted her face. The hollowness of his expression, what she could make out of it, chilled her, and her voice shook as she tried to form the question she wanted, "Where is...?"
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Twinflame - 12-13-2013
His brother, K'thalen. K'ile could recall the man's silhouette cast against an otherworldly horizon made of fire and smoke. He could see it when he closed his eyes and glanced upward; it was etched upon the roof of his skull. There his brother, the tribe's greatest Nunh, stood dying beside a collage of other such images. Some he had names for, many he did not, and while he felt his head overflowing with images of death still there was a mad artist scrabbling along the cracks that battle had left in his mind, and each time K'ile looked the devilish mural had expanded.
He didn't even look for the words to answer K'piru's question. K'ile had gone to war with K'piru's Nunh, and he daughters, and he had come back without them. Couldn't she read what the battle had written into his wounds? Couldn't she feel the way he held her, now, so different than he'd ever touched anyone before? The way she had leaned into him at first, shook freely beneath him, had made him think that she did, but now, maybe not.
Swallowing the air the hung about Antimony, one as much of death as it was of the only hope and connection he had left, K'ile said, "They aren't here." It was the simplest observation he'd ever uttered, but the only thing he could have said.
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Naunet - 12-13-2013
The day the sky had filled with flames, their Warden's light and heat bathing them in an incomprehensible destruction, flashed across K'piru's mind. She watched the sweat beading on K'ile's cheek and heard again the screams of children, of elders, of family. In the dirt and blood smudged on his features, she saw tents wreathed in flames, dark silhouettes fleeing and catching alight themselves. Their shrieks of pain echoed like cracks of lightning between her ears.
She hardly realized the scream was her own.
Hands pressing flat against his arms, K'piru pushed back against K'ile, crying out, "No! They're just coming up behind!" And made to flee, in the direction the tia had come. She couldn't feel her limbs swinging, only the shuddering of her heart in her chest. She couldn't see the sand beneath her feet, only wavering mirages bathed in fire.
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Twinflame - 12-13-2013
The strength and suddenness of K'piru's reaction caught K'ile off guard, and in his own disorientation he couldn't be sure if she was pushing him back or if something else was pulling him away. As though with a rush of wind that threw him back, the brightness and heat of the desert flickered around him, and the smell of the woman he'd anchored himself too was stirred up and mixed into the smell of death and fire.
For a half a second, K'ile was lost in a maelstrom of senses that confused and stung every bit as much as the sandstorms of the Sagolii, but when he came out of it he still stood. One arm was stretched out, holding K'piru at the elbow, as she struggled to run away from him. His hand, paralyzed in its desperation, had not let go of her. K'ile couldn't let go of her. He'd run all this way here from Cartenau, feverish in his need to reach K'piru. And she was trying to get away from him.
His hand felt as though it had fused into a rigid fist and would never uncoil. K'piru seemed to dangle sideways against her own weight. "Please," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry! They aren't..." he could feel the grief and guilt churning within him like an illness. He hadn't expected the guilt. It had waited until now. "I tried! I'm sorry! Please, don't...!" He didn't have the words for this. He didn't know the language for this.
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Naunet - 12-13-2013
"Don't lie!" The words tore her throat ragged. "Don't you lie to me!" Her arm ached all the way through her shoulder as she continued to strain desperately against K'ile's grip. She could see them - all fiery read hair and tanned skin, bruised from battle but grinning, relieved. She could see them; they crested a far dune, tiny shapes rocking with heavy steps on the horizon. They were coming, and she had to meet them, to welcome them home and clean their dirty faces and care for their hurts and help them rebuild their lives.
"Don't lie," K'piru sobbed and doubled over herself and K'ile's arm. "They're here. He's... he's coming." The words tumbled from her mouth in broken splinters of sound.
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Twinflame - 12-13-2013
When she fell, he did too. She was the gravity that pulled him down. He leaned forward so that his knee hit the ground next to her and he put his other arm around her. He could feel the bones that her thin muscle wrapped, and the way they shivered under the immense weight of the things he had no words to say. "I'm sorry," was all he had. "I tried. I did everything I could! I couldn't." He coughed the words with feverish disregard. He vomited them from his lungs and gut. They rushed out of him like blood. "I'm sorry. I couldn't bring them home."
He could hear mingling in the camp. He didn't listen. Those coming home from Cartenau, like him, bearing news of death like he did. Those very same people, who had gone to fight, being told that those they'd tried to protect weren't here waiting for them. They exchanged the news of death, taking turns handing off terror and despair, and each new hand and breath magnified it. It was a hideous process. K'ile didn't listen.
He squeezed K'piru as though she might slip away into the sand. She might have died. What would he have done, if he had returned and she was dead? Or dying? What would he have done?
Someone howled in the tent nearby. Someone who smelled familiar writhed inside their charred flesh, and their breath rattled and seized.
What would K'ile Tia done if he had come all the way home just to watch K'piru die, slowly, in grief and pain? He shook his head viciously. She was alive. k'piru was alive.
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Naunet - 12-13-2013
Each word he spoke sunk into her chest like arrows, with all the fatal accuracy of their family's greatest hunters. She writhed in the sand, in K'ile's arms, her limbs struggling to claw their way towards those shadows she could see so clear and so far in the distance, black spots, like ash. Like charred bodies.
The wail that broke from her lungs and throat pulled roughly on her spine, curling her against K'ile's arms. Her fingers first dug into the sand, tearing into the rough grains, and then into those arms. She couldn't think. She couldn't breathe. Her life, her blood, so much of what she'd cared for, and everything she had cared most for - it was all gone.
Her stomach twisted until she felt ill, but when she coughed and gagged, only thick, wrenching sobs that shook every bone in her body worked their way out. She clambered desperately at K'ile while simultaneously recoiling from his scent, from their scent.
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Twinflame - 12-13-2013
He was there. She was alive. They were both broken but alive. So much had been destroyed, and the massive world had suddenly become so small, but they were alive. He held K'piru, felt her body and her fear and her sadness, and her suffering, and he tried to hold her together. She felt like she was about to fall apart and he was just trying to hold her together even though he had no idea how. It was the only way to keep himself together. It was the only way to make sure that the world, everything that had ever been real to him at all, did not crumble around him.
K'ile's mind turned around to a memory of the battle, of an otherworldly landscape littered with bodies and weapons. It had been something so far beyond any stories he had ever been told as a child, something far more terrible than anything he could've dreamed. The memory of the nightmare rolled in his mind, and he could remember his brother laying down in the midst of it. No laying down, no, but thrown down. Smashed against the ground. Burned and broken.
Shaking as he held K'piru, K'ile said, "I'm going to take care of you. I promised that." The words felt weak coming out of his own throat. He wished he could say stronger words, but there was no language for that either. All sense of language failed him. He just couldn't speak what needed to be spoken. "I'm going to be here. I'll do what I have to. I'm sorry, but, I'll be here."
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Naunet - 12-13-2013
Her sobs stopped with an unnatural suddenness, the sounds stilling though her body still trembled as though it were about to shake into a million pieces. Her limbs did not feel as part of her body; her head sagged as though her neck were nothing more than limp tendon and skin. Her tail writhed still, painting vicious contortions in the sand, but its actions seemed well beyond her control.
K'ile's words sounded from very far away, warped and muffled and echoing strangely in her skull. She knew he still held her, but she couldn't feel his arms. Something choked in the back of her throat, but whatever words or noise she had attempted to form died before she could even think it.
She still looked to the horizon, past a blurry wall of hair, but she could not find those approaching silhouettes. Their absence left her utterly numb.
Her only response to K'ile was a complete cessation of everything.
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Twinflame - 12-13-2013
"I'm here. I'll be here. I'm sorry. I tried. But I'll be here." His words became a disconnected string of statements, of promises and apologies. That was all he had left, and each of them was infinitely weak. There was nothing he could think or say, and not a thing he could do to change what was still happening around him. She stopped crying, went limp, and he took the chance to pull her close. He felt like she was something he had to protect, or maybe something broken he had to mend, but she was also the one thing left of any value to him. K'piru, the tribe, these charred people and toppled tents.
K'piru was limp in his arms, and he wondered if she had fainted. It would be merciful if she had, but her tail betrayed her wakefulness. He couldn't guess what was going on in her mind or her heart. Those were things he could touch or sense, had never been able to, even though K'thalen seemed to manage. K'ile held her body, uttered his apologies and promises, but there was nothing he could do for her. He was helpless under the shadow of the smoke, through which burned the pitiless eye of Azeyma, reticent and unyielding.
Maybe she had broken. Maybe he had broken too. Maybe they would just stay there in the sand, unmoving, as the dunes blew in to cover them up. Just like the bodies vaguely shrouded just outside of camp.
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Naunet - 12-13-2013
Her light, her life. She couldn't find her light.
In her silence, K'piru screamed.
***
The two were not alone in their displays of grief. As K'ile and K'piru bowed against one another, the weary atmosphere of the tribe dragged further into desolation. The wounded ground and shook in the pain of the bodies and hearts, and those shadowed word-bearers shook with them. Throughout it all, Azeyma watched, ever aware, ever distant.
Enough time passed that the sun had traveled a great leap across the sky when someone finally approached K'ile and K'piru. She came from the tent they had packed the wounded into, bare feet leaving sluggish gouges in the sand behind her. The cloth wrappings she wore were stained with the reds and browns and yellows of death, as K'piru's were, and when she spoke, it was with a quietness that dared not disturb their solitude.
"Leeka took a turn for the worse," she began, blue eyes shivering over K'ile's back. "We need... I don't know what to do. K'piru..."
The motionless woman in K'ile's arms did not respond save for a weak twisting of her tail.
RE: The Dunes Would Bury Them [[pre-2.0, Hipparion Tribe, ooc welcome]] - Twinflame - 12-13-2013
Holding K'piru against him, K'ile lay over her weakly. It was rest. It was the very first moment he'd taken since long before the battle had begun, to rest. The only thing that enabled that was K'piru, still beneath him, even though he could almost feel her crumbling. If she just rested like this, stayed still and calm so he could hold her together, she would be fine. He could take care of her. He was sure. There was nothing else, in the entire world, that he cared about.
K'leeka Fidar, mother of K'yohko Nunh, was dying. K'ile Tia couldn't bring himself to care. How terrible was that? Even his brother's other women, K'nirha and K'eyrah, were not worth his attention. All he cared about was K'piru, alone in the entire world.
K'ile Tia pulled K'piru against him, squeezed her, and glanced up at the woman who had come to seek K'piru's aid, and said, "I don't think she can." If K'piru hadn't moved yet, she wouldn't. Maybe K'piru was like K'ile, and couldn't manage to care. Maybe K'piru was like Azeyma, and could neither care nor speak, just hanging there over the sands to be sought but not attained.